
«i»i^;''«'^?i*iff!j^f^pWi''»''TR«fTt^^ ■ ■'• ■*'^'V-^ r- '', "^ ^.^^ri^k": 1 



"i 



THE ABUNDANT LIFE 



NOBLE 



BV 




Book. fV ^ 



fflXQilGHT DEPDS{C. 



THE ABUNDANT LIFE 



GRINNELL VESPERS 



THE ABUNDANT LIFE 



BY 

CHARLES NOBLE 




THE TORCH PRESS 
CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA 
NINETEEN EIGHTEEN 



Mi' 



COPYRIGHT 1918 
BY CHARLES NOBLE 



THE TORCH PRESS 

CEDAR RAPIDS 

IOWA 



JUN !l 19(8 



©GI.A499302 



D 



To My Wife 



CONTENTS 




The Abundant Life 


II 


The Reasonable Life . 


25 


The Life of Vision . 


41 


The Manly Life . 


59 


The Beautiful Life 


1^ 


The Commonplace Life . 


85 


The Life of Great Possession 


103 



^ 



^^I came that they may have life, and that 
they may have it abundantly." 

— John X-io. 



THE ABUNDANT LIFE 

Far too much religious and moral energy 
is spent in restriction. Men say to themselves : 
I must cut off all that hinders the highest. I 
must not be sensual ; I must not be intemper- 
ate; I must not be frivolous; I must not do 
this; I must not do that; and for the most part 
they say well. Every one of these restrictions 
may be necessary, but they must not absorb the 
energy of one's spiritual endeavor. In them- 
selves they will never make up a religious, 
much less a really Christian experience. Gram- 
matically two negatives may make an affirm- 
ative; but it is a weak affirmative, and spiri- 
tually no conceivable number of negations can 
make the grand affirmative which is the only 
possible beginning and the continual expres- 
sion of the really spiritual life. The athlete 
must, of course, train away every ounce of su- 
perfluous flesh; must cut himself off from 
sweets and fats and all weakening foods and 
drinks; but no imaginable degree or amount 



12 The Abundant Life 

of such abstinence will: win the race. What 
commands victory is the dogged persistence 
in one's best gait during the earlier stages 
of the race, and at the critical moment bring- 
ing into action every ounce of energy. Jesus 
doubtless emphasized the negative side when 
he told us to pluck out or cut off the offending 
eye or arm; but note the order of his words 
in the statement of what is necessary in order 
to discipleship. ^^If any man would be my 
disciple let him deny himself, take up his 
cross daily, and follow me." The denial, the 
cross, are conditions necessary and precedent; 
but the crowning emphasis is on the last words 
^^follow me." That is the real life; the other 
is important only in order to that. The de- 
nial, the negation, is the narrow gate; the 
way, reaching on and on through existence, 
that is positive life. What Jesus came for 
is not ultimately, though it may be prima- 
rily, to have us enter through the gate. That 
of course is necessary; but it is only in order 
to our traveling on in the way. "I came," 
he said, ^^that they may have life, and may 
have it abundantly." ^^Over and above," 
^^more than enough," would be fair alterna- 



The Abundant Life 13 

tive renderings of the words. Instead of a 
narrowed, limited, restricted life, as religion 
is too often conceived, Christ's idea for men 
is a life overflowing, rich, full, large, strong; 
in a word, abundant. 

Life is a vague term and its four letters veil 
an unsolved mystery. No scientist's analysis 
has yet discovered its secret; no philosopher's 
speculation has yet discovered its meaning. 
Yet it is the commonest of all common posses- 
sions, and while we may not define it or explain 
it, we know it, and we can test its fulness or 
its narrowness by the study of its familiar char- 
acteristics. One element of life certainly is 
knowledge. The dead or the unborn know 
nothing. The infant knows little, the babe 
knows a little more, the child more, the youth 
more, the full grown man should know yet 
more. Abundance of life may be partly test- 
ed, then, by abundance of knowledge ; and we 
ask, how does the Christ life answer to that 
test? It is true that knowledge of a certain 
sort is characteristic of the life of the world, 
as distinguished from the Christ life. ^^The 
children of this world," said Jesus, ^^are wiser 
in their generation (after their fashion, or in 



14 The Abundant Life 

their way?) , than the children of light." There 
is a sort of knowledge of life which the so- 
called ^^man-of-the-world" has in a special de- 
gree; but it is a narrow and a narrowing type 
of knowledge. The last newspaper sensation 
in the scandal world illustrates this sort of 
knowledge; and from it we may well pray 
^^Good Lord deliver us." Christ surely draws 
away from the knowledge of vice to the know- 
ledge that maketh pure, but that is just another 
way of saying that the Christ brand of know- 
ledge is more abundant than the other. 

The Christ man, as such, has abundant 
knowledge of nature. He has no right to take 
narrow views of the garment of his God, of 
the revelation of the power of Him who has 
revealed the secret of life; and that is a part 
of the Christ idea of nature. Advancement 
in the knowledge of nature is one of the dis- 
tinguishing characteristics of Christian na- 
tions, and should be characteristic of every 
Christian soul. Our Master bids us consider 
the lilies ; and the spirit of that lesson leads us 
into all the mysteries of creation. It is won- 
derful how Jesus has written his name in all 
the forms and forces of the material world, 



The Abundant Life 15 

and so, invites those who love him to know 
them. If we look up into the sky at night we 
remember him who taught us to pray ^^Our 
Father in the heavens." Every star that shines 
may stand to us for the star of Bethlehem. At 
sun-rise we think of his command that we be 
like our Father, who maketh his sun to shine 
upon the evil and the good. The grass of the 
field, with its blooming dandelions and daisies 
always calls to mind his warning that we be 
not anxious about raiment. He has made the 
water of every spring or fountain to sparkle 
for us as the eternal symbol of spiritual life. 
He has glorified even the sparrow, as he com- 
pels us to remember that not one of them shall 
fall to the ground without our Father, The 
poetic knowledge of nature, then, the "light 
that never was on sea or land," that most pre- 
cious gift of genius, Christ opens to every be- 
lieving soul. This world of nature was his 
home; he dwelt in it, the years he spent on 
earth; and so he wins men to its study, and 
makes the very leaves and drops and pebbles 
sacred, because parts of his Father's house. 

No less does the Christ life mean abundance 
in the scientific knowledge of nature. The 



i6 The Abundant Life 

student of Physics, or of Botany or Chemistry 
or Zoology should have no quarrel with the 
belief of the Christian. Should have? he has 
no such quarrel. His Christian faith, if it be 
really Christian at first hand, and not diluted 
or perverted, makes him the better able to ob- 
serve, to receive, to believe the truth. The 
scientific spirit is essentially the Christian spir- 
it; for it is essentially truth loving, truth seek- 
ing, patient, humble, unselfish, pure. In spite 
of some noisy assertions to the contrary, really 
scientific men are essentially Christian; and it 
is no accident, but arises from the very neces- 
sity of the case that all great advances in scien- 
tific knowledge of nature have been under 
Christian influences, in Christian nations, 
among Christian men. 

Again, Christ brings us into touch with man 
as well as nature. He is himself the ideal man. 
Knowing him you know man as God made 
him and meant him to be. With the spirit of 
Christ moving your spirit, you will also come 
to know your fellow man as you could not 
without that spirit. Here, again, observed 
fact accords with theory. The comparative 
study of religions makes much of Ethnic ideas, 



The Abundant Life ij 

dividing mankind into nations and races. The 
Study of the Christ teaching takes us through 
these Ethnic outside qualities to the inward 
humanity. Christ seems to have thought very 
little about his nation or about other nations. 
His concern seems to have been almost alto- 
gether with man as man. So the Christ life 
may be consistent with a true patriotism as 
with a true family and neighborly love, and a 
true self respect; but it can never be confined 
within these boundaries, and always goes out 
after the man. Hence the Christian knows no 
class, no race, no distinction whatever. Doubt- 
less individuals and churches have failed la- 
mentably to measure up to this universality. 
Yet, with all its failings, the Church of Christ 
is the one institution on earth which makes ab- 
solutely no distinction among men. Men, wo- 
men, children, rich, poor, barbarian, Scythian, 
bond, free: they are all there; and the indi- 
vidual or the congregation which falls below 
this ideal and narrows itself to class or race or 
nation, is a confessed defaulter to the Christ 
ideal. So the Christian must know his fellow 
man; and the Christian life, even in its imper- 
fect realization, brings man to wider know- 



1 8 The Abundant Life 

ledge of his brother man than has been ever 
approached apart from Christ. 

The Christ life is abundant in the highest 
knowledge of all, the knowledge of God. ^^This 
is life eternal," says John, giving us his under- 
standing of the teaching of the Master, ^^that 
ye may know God and Jesus Christ whom he 
has sent." Knowledge is of the very essence of 
life. When you cease to know you cease to 
live; and life complete and perfect, life at its 
climax, is knowledge at its climax, the know- 
ledge of God. The Christ life calls you to this 
knowledge. The simplest minded Christian, 
he who has least of what is ordinarily called 
knowledge, has this advantage over the wisest 
agnostic. He knows God. Herein he has life, 
and has it abundantly. 

Life, if complete, must add to knowledge, 
action; and the Christ life means abundance 
of activity. They utterly misread the Master's 
message who took it to mean that they might 
escape the temptations of the world by hiding 
in caverns or standing upon pillars, doing no- 
thing all their days. No less did they mistake 
who in days of persecution rushed upon mar- 
tyrdom, seeking death for the sake of Christ. 



The Abundant Life 19 

True, he said that he who would lose his life 
for his sake should find it. True it is better to 
die as to the body than to slay the soul by un- 
faithfulness, by yielding to the selfish and bes- 
tial impulses of the flesh. Realizing the truth 
and importance of all this it remains unques- 
tionable that Christ's command is to life and 
to the life of action, rather than the life of re- 
pose. Repose, for him, meant action. In that 
sweet invitation which has come like the even- 
song bell to weary spirits in all ages: ^^Come 
unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden," 
the call is indeed to rest, to soul rest; but how 
is that rest to be gained? The music of the 
blessed words flows on: ^^Take my yoke upon 
you and learn of me." The yoke is a tool for 
action too strenuous for any single life. By 
the help of the yoke you may carry more and 
pull harder than would be possible without. 
There is no better realization of the strenuous 
life, as there is no better realization of the sim- 
ple life, than in the life that Christ gives to 
man. Simple in the unity of its purposes, in 
the straightforward directness of its motives, 
it is strenuous in the multiplicity of its oppor- 
tunities and the stringency of its demands. 



20 The Abundant Life 

Richer, fuller, with wider contact, with might- 
ier influence in all directions than any other 
life, the Christ life bids you be and do the very 
highest, best and most that is possible to your 
nature. Sin is always crippling, limiting, hin- 
dering. Unbelief makes advance, adventure, 
discovery impossible. He has the strength of 
ten whose heart is pure. He has a power other- 
wise undreamed of who has the Christ motive 
pushing him into action. Christian activity 
knows no limitation of natural inertia ; for it 
is inspired by Him who is the central dominant 
force within and behind all natural forces. 
Christian activity knows no limitation of na- 
tion or race or language. It belts the globe 
with its mission stations ; it teaches the nations 
with its Bible translated into every tongue. 
Christian activity knows no limitation of hu- 
man weakness. It is of the spirit and acts upon 
the spirit of man. The Christian comes into 
the broadest and the highest sphere of activity 
possible. Christ came that he might have the 
life of action, and that he might have it abun- 
dantly. 

Knowledge and action spell character. 
Knowledge forms character; action expresses 



The Abundant Life 21 

character. The life that Christ came to give 
may be viewed in the aspect of character; and 
here again it is true that the Christ character is 
that of which we may most accurately use the 
word abundant. The Christian character is in 
its essence broad and full ; the common concep- 
tion of a Christian as typically a narrow limit- 
ed sort of being is a radically false idea. Doubt- 
less many narrow, limited persons are Chris- 
tians. We have all known them; some of us 
are they. We have no very great abundance 
in our characters, some of us must sadly con- 
fess ; but that is because our Christianity is of 
a very imperfect sort. We have it, and so far 
as we really do have it, it broadens us, deepens 
us, fills us more and more abundantly. Though 
it is not yet very abundant in us; though we 
must confess ourselves to be sadly limited, yet 
the broadest, most abundant phase of our char- 
acter is our Christianity. So there are doubt- 
less men and women of many sided ability, of 
wide knowledge, of intense activity, of pure, 
strong, lovable moral character, whom we 
could not honestly call Christians. But their 
lack of the distinguishing Christian quality 
narrows and limits them. They would be 



22 



The Abundant Life 



broader, stronger, more abundant personalities 
if they had the Christ spirit, if they had re- 
ceived the life which he came to give. Con- 
sider the life of him who gives us life. Think 
how abundant in knowledge, how abundant in 
action, how abundant in character was the life 
of Jesus. If we will take him as our life, bring 
ourselves up close to him, let his spirit rule our 
spirits, our lives shall be broader, deeper, high- 
er, more abundant. 

This abundance of life which Christ gives 
contains in itself the assurance of immortality. 
To be sure, abundance of life is a matter of 
quality rather than of quantity. Continuance 
is not the essential thing. A twenty year life 
on earth with fulness, with consecration, is 
more abundant than a century of worldliness. 
That to be sure; but it is inconceivable that 
the life which Jesus came to give should be an- 
nihilated by the physical incident that men 
call death. It is not conceivable that the life 
of Jesus ceased when his heart broke on the 
cross. It is not conceivable that the life which 
has the Christ quality should cease because the 
blood ceases to course through the body. The 
essential matter is the quality of life rather 



The Abundant Life 23 

than its quantity. Yes! but that quality of 
spiritual reality, of purity, of Christlikeness, 
carries with it the assurance that it shall not 
cease. Some recent psychologists question 
individual immortality because recent psy- 
chology has fixed its attention upon the brain 
and the nerves which perish when the body 
dies. But because certain investigators fail 
to find the immortal spirit in the brain and 
nerve tissues, it hardly follows that the im- 
mortal spirit does not exist. No thinker 
ever really believed that the spirit of man 
could be discovered by the microscope, or 
could be identified with brain and nerve re- 
actions. Ah! No! We have brain and 
nerves for purposes of thought, feeling and 
will. We are spirits, in the image of God; and 
he who came that we might have life and that 
we might have it abundantly is he who said ; 
^^I am the resurrection and the life. He that 
liveth and believeth in me shall never die." 



^^I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the 
mercies of God to present your bodies a living 
sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is 
your reasonable service." 

— Romans, XIL-I 



i 



THE REASONABLE LIFE 

It has become one of the commonplaces, those 
precious commonplaces, like love, friendship, 
truth and kindness, that the ^^Grinnell spirit" 
means service. The readiness to give our lives 
freely for the help of our fellows, service to 
the College, on the field of athletics, in the so- 
ciety, in the class room, in any and all possible 
phases of college life, that is our old time long 
recognized test of true college spirit. The 
^^kicker," the ^^knocker," the critic of unkindly 
spirit we refuse to consider a true Grinnell 
man. The spirit of fellowship, the unity of in- 
terest, the consciousness that we all, alumni, 
trustees, officers, faculty, students, constitute 
one solid body, with a real organic unity of 
life, made up of individuals who will yield in- 
dividual interest to the common interest, who 
will work together in any reasonable manner 
or method that the common good may de- 
mand; this is what we mean by the ^^Grinnell 
spirit." 



26 The Abundant Life 

Now the moment we bring this conception 
of the ^^Grinnell spirit" into comparison with 
the Christian spirit we notice that the two are 
essentially one. What the Christ spirit asks is 
precisely this ideal of fellowship in service 
and service in fellowship. When the disciples 
of Jesus were disputing among themselves 
which should be greatest, the Master* took a 
napkin, and girded himself, and washed the 
disciples' feet. He said ^^Behold, I am among 
you as he that serveth." He said, ^^He that 
would be great among you, let him be servant 
of all." Service was the ideal of Christ. Ser- 
vice was what he came to ofifer to man. Ser- 
vice was what he demanded of men. He sent 
out his followers to service. He trained them 
to service. He bound them together in the 
fellowship of the Church for service. They 
were to be ready to give their lives for their 
fellow men; to die if necessary, but at any rate 
to live for their fellow men. They were to be 
willing to put this ideal first in their lives ; to 
leave home, friends, father, mother, all sweet- 
est and strongest ties of nature and of habit, 
to fulfill this service. His call was to fling 
one's life against the evil forces of the world, 



The Reasonable Life 27 

to sink one's own interests in devotion to the 
Divine ideal ; to give one's self with entire sur- 
render to the work of building men up in the 
highest life. 

^^If any man cometh unto me, and hateth 
not his own father, and mother, and wife, 
and children, and brethren and sisters, yea 
and his own life also, he cannot be my dis- 
ciple." This is perhaps the hardest of the hard 
sayings of the Master. He said it when ^^great 
multitudes were following him." It was the 
challenge which he flung in the faces of the 
fickle crowd, who were drawn to him by his 
miracles and by the grace and wonderful beau- 
ty of his teachings. It was the strongest of those 
biting, testing words by which he deliberately 
wrecked his popularity and made sure his cru- 
cifixion. But, allowing for the paradox in the 
form of the statement, these words just put in- 
to the strongest possible language the idea 
which underlies our commonplace of the 
^^Grinnell spirit," the idea, namely, that private 
interests, private prejudices, private affections, 
even, must yield to the general good; that a 
life self centred is a life sure to fail; that true 
success is found and is found only in the will- 



28 The Abundant Life 

ing surrender of all our powers to the supreme 
ideal of service. A man can not be a true 
^^Grinnell man," a woman can not have the true 
Grinnell spirit, then, unless that man and that 
woman have in their hearts the Christ ideal, 
and show by word and deed that they are fol- 
lowing the light of that ideal. 

We can not give this ideal of Christian liv- 
ing fair consideration without realizing that 
it is a perfectly reasonable ideal. It is no 
dream of the mystic, fit food for fancy, por- 
traying an ideal which can be realized only in 
a spiritual world. It is, on the contrary, a 
strictly scientific philosophy of human life, to 
be lived among men just as we know men to be, 
to be squared with just such circumstances as 
those familiar to our every day experience. 
The self-centered life is the unreasonable life. 
The Christian life, the life of service, is the 
reasonable life. There is a very common fash- 
ion of talking as if the unselfish ideals of 
Christ were unpractical, not to be lived in the 
every day world, possible of realization only 
in an imagined Eutopia, or in that future life 
to which we look forward, when the spirit 
shall be free from the bonds of the flesh. In 



The Reasonable Life 29 

truth, however, the unselfish man, living for 
the ideals of Christian service, is the only real- 
ly reasonable, practical man. 

This appears clearly when we consider that 
he alone among men faces the real facts of 
life, and especially the ugly fact of human sin- 
fulness and his own actual moral and spiritual 
condition. The soul that has not made the 
Christian decision lives in a sort of fool's par- 
adise. He dreams that he can carry out his 
own self centered scheme of life without re- 
gard to the forces of evil that actually exist and 
dominate so large a part of the real world. 
He tells himself that he is about as good as 
other men, and that other men are about as 
good as they can be expected to be, and that 
he and they alike can go on through life, liv- 
ing about as they now live, leaving sin out 
of the calculation, and, when the evening of 
their life shall come, be satisfied. The soul 
that makes the Christian decision, putting 
foremost in his life Christ's ideal, faces the 
grim fact of sin. He recognizes his own need 
of a saviour from sin. He recognizes the 
power of evil in the world about him. He 
has his eyes open to the great grim fact of 



30 The Abundant Life 

evil in the world; and so, as a reasonable be- 
ing, he takes account of the actual opposition, 
both within and without, which he will have 
to face in putting his ideal into his life. 

The reasonable quality of the Christ life 
appears again, from the fact that it and it 
alone recognizes and uses the one supreme 
moral force in the universe. There is really 
no question among thoughtful men that the 
life and character, if not the death and resur- 
rection of Jesus, constitute the great moral 
force of the world's history. Yet those who 
count themselves and are counted by many of 
their fellows shrewd, practical men of busi- 
ness try to live their lives without that moral 
force. The great world of politics and states- 
manship blunders along with such infinite loss 
and damage, largely because it so completely 
ignores the one great spiritual force that 
counts in the universe. The nations waste un- 
counted treasures of wealth in military and 
naval expenditures, in futile and costly meth- 
ods of government; they are wasting now un- 
countable treasures of human life in war; and 
practical men, so called, sanction this folly of 
waste and wickedness of carnage, and sneer at 



The Reasonable Life 31 

peace men as unpractical. In fact the most 
practical thing, the most reasonable thing, the 
nations of the world today could do would be 
to cease the waste of human life, to come to an 
agreement to build no more battle ships and 
organize no more armies, to make the Hague 
tribunal a real international court, and bring 
all their disputes before that court for settle- 
ment. The nations will come to that practi- 
cal, reasonable course when they really take 
Christ the great spiritual force of the universe 
for the guide of their counsels, for the ruler of 
their measures. 

Just as true is it of the individual that a rea- 
sonable decision as to life will put him in touch 
with the one spiritual force which has in it the 
real power of an endless life. You want to live 
right. You say, my friend, that you are trying 
to live right. You will not say that you are 
succeeding in the effort; but admit that thus 
far your life is not a great success. You know 
that there is in the history of mankind one life 
that is ideal, that there is one being who has 
lived as you and I know that we ought to live, 
of whom one can never say that in anything he 
could have been better than he was. This is a 



32 The Abundant Life 

fact of history which practically no one doubts. 
We can go nowhere else for the ideal of human 
living, and going there for that ideal we find 
it. Now, then, the absolutely reasonable thing 
for you to do is to bring your life into touch 
with that life. 

Another fact is equally beyond dispute. The 
purest, best lives of men in history are those 
lives which have come nearest to the Christ. 
The Christ life is not merely an ideal ; it has 
been realized in individuals, not in any one 
completely, but in many partially, in some 
with wonderful sweetness and power. The 
highest, purest, sweetest lives we know in his- 
tory are those which have drawn their power 
of living from Jesus. Then yet more emphat- 
ically we may say that the absolutely reason- 
able thing for me and for you, is to bring our 
lives into vital relations with that life which 
has had, in the past, such power to make the 
spirits of men great and pure. 

Just as true is it of the present as of the past 
that the one spiritual force which counts most 
is the Christ spirit. It is the Christ spirit 
which sent Harry Lauder into the trenches to 
sing courage into the hearts of the "Tommies" 



The Reasonable Life 33 

and heal his own spirit sore from the loss of 
his only son. It is the Christ spirit which 
shines through the lines of that wonderful re- 
cord called ^^Soldiers of France." It is the 
Christ spirit ultimately which is responsible 
for the organization and work of the ^^Red 
Cross," and absolutely for all the world wide 
and inestimable service of the Young Men's 
and the Young Women's Christian Associa- 
tions. In our own day, as in past days, the 
Christ ideal is inspiring men and women all 
around the world in beautiful service of their 
fellow men. 

Come closer to your own lives. Your sweet 
mothers, your brave fathers, did they not 
gather their sweetness and their courage from 
their fellowship with the Christ? The good 
and pure and strong spirits of your acquaint- 
ance, those who have brought before you the 
ideal of the highest living, have they not been 
filled with the Christ spirit? Has not the 
Master spoken to you through them? Have 
they not walked with him? The best life that 
we know anything about, the purest charac- 
ters we know among men, the good men, the 
good women of our acquaintance, are they not 



34 The Abundant Life 

the men of God, the women of Christ? Is it 
not then the reasonable thing Jor you and me, 
that we should bring ourselves close to that 
life which shows, today, such power to trans- 
form, purify, and energize the lives of the men 
and women whom we know? 

Bringing the thought squarely against our 
individual life, it follows from these consider- 
ations that the service of Christ is your reason- 
able service, with the emphasis on ^^your." It 
is reasonable not only in general ; it is reason- 
able in particular. It is good not only for 
Paul, Luther, Wesley, Moody; it is good for 
us today. It is good not only for your mother, 
father, sister, friend; it is good for you. A 
young man said to me once, that he could 
not see that ^^being a Christian" could make 
any difference in his life. He thought he 
was trying to live right, and if he called him- 
self a Christian still all he could do would be 
be to try to live right. That sounded plausible; 
but notice how the fallacy crept in, in the 
identification of ^^being a Christian" with 
" calling himself a Christian." To be sure it 
might not make any difference to call him- 



The Reasonable Life 35 

self a Christian, though there is a strong if 
somewhat subtle influence in what we call our- 
selves ; but to be a Christian would surely make 
a difference. That soul needed the power of 
the Christ life to give it a true life. You need 
the power of the Christ life to lift your ideal 
to the level of His. You are not so perfect, 
not so free from all forms of evil — one may 
say this much boldly of any man — but that you 
personally need exactly what the definite deci- 
sion for Christ will give you. 

It is your reasonable service because your 
conscience approves it. I have yet to meet the 
man or woman who on principle objects to 
the Christian life. I have talked with a good 
many who, for one supposed reason or another, 
told me that they did not count themselves as 
Christians; but with absolutely no exception 
they say that it is right, they profess to be glad 
that others are making the decision; they 
would say that it is good for the community 
to have the ideal of Christian living brought 
to the attention of the people; but they were 
not ready to make that ideal their own. Is 
not such an attitude essentially unreasonable? 



36 The Abundant Life 

Is it not the reasonable thing to accept for 
one's own life that which conscience approves, 
and reject what conscience condemns? 

It is yours because it is within your reach. 
You can make it actually yours ; therefore it 
is potentially yours. You have a right to it, 
and should exercise that right. This Chris- 
tian ideal of service is not something far away, 
remote from your knowledge and experience, 
which has to be brought to you at great labor 
and pains. ^^Say not in thy heart, who shall 
ascend up into heaven ? (That is to bring Christ 
down) or who shall descend into the abyss, 
(that is to bring Christ up from the dead.) 
But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, in 
thy mouth and in thy heart: that is, the word 
of faith, which we preach.'' The Christ ideal 
is close to you; a matter of every day living; 
something that is actually within your reach 
this very hour. 

Thus, when the invitation and the impulse 
come to us to make a definite decision for 
Christ, the reasonable thing is to accept the in- 
vitation, to yield to the impulse, without re- 
gard to the doctrinal or rhetorical form in 



The Reasonable Life 37 

which the matter is presented. I suppose 
there could hardly be a greater contrast in 
these superficial matters than that between 
John the Baptist and Jesus. John was an as- 
cetic; Jesus ate and drank as did others of his 
time. John lived a hermit life in the wilder- 
ness; Jesus lived a social life among his fel- 
lows. But John was preaching repentance and 
righteousness, and the first public act of the 
life of Jesus was to enroll himself among the 
followers of the Baptizer. John himself per- 
ceived a sort of incongruity in the situation 
and hesitated to baptize the Master, but Jesus 
said — and the words are pregnant with mean- 
ing for all time — ^^Suflfer it now; for thus 
it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness." 
It is a reasonable thing for a man to put him- 
self squarely where he belongs; to declare 
himself on the side that his inmost soul assures 
him is the right side. 

Again, it is reasonable to yield to the im- 
pulse which bids us to take a definite step in 
the direction of the higher life because the 
coming of that impulse may be a divinely giv- 
en opportunity, and the suppression of such an 



38 The Abundant Life 

impulse may be the final refusal of the soul to 
embrace the opportunity. 

^^Once to every man and nation comes the 

moment to decide, 
In the strife with Truth and Falsehood 

for the good or evil side." 

Lowell was doubtless thinking of things 
other than the choice between the Christian 
life and that of the Christless world; yet the 
one involves the other. The vision of some- 
thing better than we have before experienced, 
and the impulse to make a step forward in our 
inner life; these, in whatever form they come, 
are priceless opportunities, and their coming 
makes a critical moment When they come in 
the vision of the Christ and the impulse to 
make him your ideal and his life your life„ 
beware how you let the opportunity pass or 
suppress the impulse; 

^^And, ere it vanishes 
Over the margin. 
After it, follow it. 
Follow the gleam." 



^^Your old men shall dream dreams, your 
young men shall see visions.'^ 

— Joel II-28. 



^^I was not disobedient unto the heavenly 

— AcTsXXVI-19. 



vision." 



THE LIFE OF VISION 

There are dreams and dreams. There are 
visions and visions. The words are used rather 
indiscriminately in our Bible; yet a distinction 
can be discerned, though not always consis- 
tently observed. In the majority of the pas- 
sages in the original the dream is more associ- 
ated with sleep and inertia, the vision with 
sight and action. Dreams are more often 
spoken of in a slighting manner, though even 
visions are sometimes deprecated. There is 
basis, in the Scripture treatment of the subject, 
for the common suspicion, to put it mildly, we 
feel as to the dreamer or the visionary. For 
example, in Deuteronomy: ^^You shall not 
hearken to that dreamer of dreams"; and in 
Jeremiah: ^^Hearken not to your prophets, 
diviners, dreams, soothsayers, sorcerers," where 
the prophet and the dream are found in ques- 
tionable company. So in Ecclesiastes, the Old 
Testament book of common sense: ^Tor a 
dream cometh with a multitude of business; 



42 The Abundant Life 

and a fool's voice with a multitude of words." 
Jeremiah breathes a high scorn of the dreamer 
when he gives out the Lord's word as follows: 
^^I have heard what the prophets have said 
that prophesy lies in my name, saying, I have 
dreamed, I have dreamed; which think to 
cause my people to forget, by their dreams." 
On the other hand the vision and dream are 
both recognized as true means of communion 
with God, in a striking passage in the book of 
Numbers: though even here it is suggested 
that there may be a better way: ^^If there be a 
prophet among you, I the Lord will make my- 
self known to him in a vision, I will speak with 
him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so; 
he is faithful in all mine house ; with him will 
I speak mouth to mouth, even manifestly, and 
not in dark speeches." 

These, however, are exceptional passages, 
and serve only to remind us to be on our guard 
against the counterfeit, and not to mistake the 
lesser for the greater. Every true prophet was 
a dreamer of dreams. The great messages of 
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel open with wonderful 
visions of the divine presence; and they with 
all the minor (so called) prophets are full of 



The Life of Vision 43 

dreams and visions. The words of Joel are 
just in line with the general course of the Old 
Testament message. As he thinks of the day 
of universal prophecy, of the gift of the divine 
spirit to all, he can express it only in the words : 
^^Your old men shall dream dreams, your 
young men shall see visions." The Gospel 
story is keyed to the same note. Joseph and 
Mary lived a dream life in those wonderful 
days just before the Christ came. To Peter on 
the house top at Joppa, to Paul on the Damas- 
cus road, to Stephen in the hour of his martyr- 
dom, to John on Patmos; to all of these came 
visions, and the visions were the dynamic im- 
pulse to which we owe all we have of Christian 
faith and life. 

In truth nothing is more real in life than 
some of these experiences we call dreams or 
visions. Perhaps, at their best, they are break- 
ings through of the real. Perhaps, compared 
with these true visions what we call waking 
reality is the dream. A bit of fugitive verse by 
some unknown writer haunts my memory: 
^^This world I deem but a beautiful dream." 
It associates itself with Shelley's line in the 
Adonais: ^^He hath awakened from the dream 



44 The Abundant Life 

of life," and with the hope of the Psalmist: ^^I 
shall be satisfied when I awake in thy likeness." 
Perhaps, when we awake, we shall realize that 
our visions were the most real experiences of 
our earth life. Whether objective or subjec- 
tive, whether they come to us from the impact 
of other spirits, of the spirit of God upon our 
spirits, or whether they arise from our own de- 
sires, sensations, hopes, fears; in any case they 
are real, tremendously real. From them arise 
the most important experiences, the most 
worth-while efforts of all our lives. The 
dream comes, vague, indefinite, perhaps in 
sleep, perhaps in waking meditation. It crys- 
tallizes in a vision; then by long planning and 
perhaps by hard toil it is wrought out into 
achievement. If there is no dream or vision, 
life is a mere round of meaningless work, an 
existence rather than a living. ^ When there is 
no vision the people perish" is a true saying, 
whether spoken of the individual, the nation, 
or of humanity. 

There comes to mind another bit of fugi- 
tive rhyme which fits this thought as it applies 
to the individual life : 



The Life of Vision 45 

When a boy is ten, his dream is a knife; 
When he is twenty, his dream is a wife; 
From thirty to fifty, 'tis business and strife; 
From fifty to seventy 'tis a quiet life. 

As the dream, so the achievement. He was 
a wise man who warned us ^^You had better be 
very careful what you wish for; you are so 
liable to get it." It would surprise some of us, 
especially the discontented ones who feel as if 
life had failed to give them their desires, if we 
could see how closely our actual place and lot 
in life corresponds to the real enduring wish. 
We fancy we would like some things which we 
do not in our souls desire, and these fancies are 
not likely to be realized in experience; but 
what we really desire, what we dream of, what 
forms itself in visions, we are most apt to 
achieve. Consider your rich man; the one 
who has achieved wealth ; you will find in the 
vast majority of cases that wealth has been his 
dream. Life has visualized itself to him in 
terms of money success, and that vision has 
been wrought out to realization by his life 
effort. 

The vision which comes to realization is 



46 The Abundant Life 

an exclusive vision. It does not deserve the 
name unless it fills the field of the soul. In 
this sense it is true that, according to the old 
proverb, there are three ways of achieving 
wealth, or making money, as the saying is: 
patrimony, matrimony, or parsimony. The 
first two may be disregarded, for they are com- 
paratively rare and not important. Inherited 
wealth is soon dissipated; it is never retained 
unless the "vision" also is inherited; and if the 
wealth gained by matrimony is a permanent 
possession it is because in this case also the 
vision is the money- vision. Either of these im- 
plies "parsimony," not in the sense of miserli- 
ness, necessarily; but in the sense of excluding 
other aims and purposes. Set your heart on 
riches, young man, and you will probably get 
riches. So is the world organized. You will 
have to pay the price, however, and that price 
will be the exclusion from your life of the 
other visions. If you marry wealth, you are 
not likely to marry love. The dream of the 
money getter will not dwell in the same soul 
with "love's young dream." So is it with the 
vision of political power, of social success, of 
sensual enjoyment. He who has the vision 



The Life of Vision /\rj 

will achieve the realization; but at the cost of 
the other possible visions of the soul. 

We are not helpless in this matter. The 
child may be tormented by bad dreams; but 
they are to a great extent the result of too many 
green apples or similar indiscretions. The 
man may also be tempted and distracted by 
unwelcome day dreams, suggestions of evil 
coming from evil influences ^^earthly, sensual, 
devilish," but if they crystallize in visions hav- 
ing power to affect the purposes and plans of 
life, it is because the will chooses to have it so. 
Your dreams and visions will correspond 
closely to your chosen pursuits and subjects of 
thought. There is a reflex action here. It 
may be hard sometimes to determine whether 
the vision is the cause of the action, in any par- 
ticular case, or whether a previous course of 
action has brought this particular vision into 
the soul. In either case, the will is partly re- 
sponsible. If the vision comes from the al- 
ready developed purpose and plan of life, it 
acts as an inspiring force to aid in carrying 
that purpose and plan into action. If it comes 
from an influence outside of ourselves, either 
beside us, or from below, or from above, the 



48 The Abundant Life 

question at once arises whether it is a vision to 
be welcomed and obeyed or to be rejected and 
banished. We are not the victims of our vi- 
sions. Rather are they ministers of evil or of 
good to our souls. Even the vision of the glo- 
rified Christ shining down upon Paul from the 
intolerable glare of the eastern sun on the 
Damascus road, had no irresistible compel- 
ling power. It was because Paul could say in 
his soul, ^^I was not disobedient unto the hea- 
venly vision" that it became the inspiring force 
of his marvellous career. So we may gain a 
two-fold practical lesson from the thought of 
these dreams and visions as related to our in- 
dividual lives; to cultivate such pure, true 
thoughts and habits of life as will tend to the 
development of high and pure visions; and 
when the lower vision comes, to be sure that 
we reject and rid ourselves of the impure, the 
earthly or the devilish; and that when the 
heavenly vision comes, we do not fail to know 
it and be not disobedient. 

The world has been vitally influenced for 
weal and woe by certain great visions of na- 
tional destiny and purpose which have arisen 
in the souls of statesmen. The men of 1776 



The Life of Vision 49 

had the vision of freedom. It dawned upon 
them in the form of independence from the 
arbitrary rule of the mother country. In some 
of them it broadened into the vision of a land 
of freemen, at first of free white men, or per- 
haps free men of English descent; then it 
broadened into a vision of freedom for black 
and white alike, a vision not yet perfectly re- 
alized; then as the rush of immigration came 
from all races of the earth, the vision has arisen 
in some hearts, of freedom for all Americans, 
democracy, government of the people by the 
people, for the people, in America, for those 
who shall become Americans as well as those 
who are born Americans. Our President 
seems to have caught a broader vision yet: 
^We ask nothing for America that we do not 
ask for all humanity" ; ^^Making the world safe 
for Democracy"; these are phrases that seem 
to grow from a vision of a world in which 
nations dwell together as brothers. Has the 
nation as a whole caught a glimpse of such a 
vision as this? In the seventeenth century 
English statesmen gained a vision of world 
wide commerce, and dominion of the seas; 
and English politics has been working out 



50 The Abundant Life 

that vision ever since. Of late there seem to 
be signs that English statesmanship has gained 
a higher, broader vision, of free government 
given to all peoples, and commercial inter- 
course with all on the basis of equality of ad- 
vantage. Will the nation be great enough to 
realize that vision? In the eighteenth century 
France got the vision of liberty, equality, 
fraternity; and French history since has been 
the struggle, with varying results, and often 
seeming to fall back into dreams of Empire 
and materialistic prosperity, but on the whole 
pressing forward, for the realization, in 
national life, of that vision. In the nine- 
teenth century, Germany got its vision of 
national unity and efficiency, and wrought it 
out to a splendid degree of realization; but 
the other vision of world domination seems 
about to blot out the former, purer dream. 

So we might go on expressing our concep- 
tions of the meaning of historical movements 
in terms of this conception of national visions 
and their attempted realization; and doubtless 
our conclusions would vary according to the 
visions of human progress which fill our im- 
aginations. The general truth however re- 



The Life of Vision 51 

mains indisputable, that humanity has moved 
forward in its weary march through the cen- 
turies, guided and inspired by the visions 
which have filled the imaginations of its great 
leaders. Forward, I say? Some of these 
visions have led forward, some backward, 
some across the main road. On the whole we 
can see that the enduring forward movement 
has been guided and inspired by three great 
visions, and inthelongsweepof history I think 
we can see these visions plainly realizing 
themselves in the development of political and 
social institutions and customs. 

There is the vision of freedom from politi- 
cal tyranny; this is what has made parliamen- 
tary, representative government, which has 
brought to pass the great republics of Amer- 
icaj France, China, Russia, the representa- 
tive, parliamentary monarchies of England 
and Italy, which seems certain to sweep all 
autocracies into the dust heap of national 
politics. There is the vision of freedom 
from industrial tyranny, not nearly so far 
advanced toward realization, but already hav- 
ing accomplished the destruction of slavery 
in civilized communities, at least of slavery as 



52 The Abundant Life 

a recognized form of industrial organization; 
already having built up the magnificent system 
of organized labor, now at last under stress of 
war conditions recognized by all civilized gov- 
ernments as a power to be counted on, to be 
respected, to be employed for governmental 
ends. There is, again, the dream of absolute 
equality of opportunity in life, yet very vague- 
ly conceived, yet perhaps but a miscellaneous 
mass of inchoate dreams, but sure to crystal- 
lize into a vision which shall guide and in- 
spire the political and social builders of in- 
stitutions in the coming centuries. 

In every generation, since Jesus gave his 
message, there have been mighty souls who 
have had and cherished the vision which pass- 
es and includes all of these : the vision of the 
Kingdom of God. Each great spirit which 
saw the vision saw it in different form. Au- 
gustine, with his imagination formed by his rev- 
erence for the wonderful government of Rome, 
called it the City of God. The little known, 
but wonderfully suggestive thinker of the nine- 
teenth century in America, Elisha Mulford, 
called it the Republic of God. Our versatile, 
brilliant, shallow, but intensely interesting 



The Life of Vision 53 

thinker of the twentieth century, Wells, has 
caught a one-sided glimpse of it, and shouts 
out exultantly his discovery of a secret that 
has been open to the real Christian for twenty 
centuries, the secret of ^^God the invisible 
King." But, never mind; doubtless it is new 
to Mr. Wells, and doubtless through him the 
secret may be revealed to those who would 
never receive it from an old fashioned believer 
in Christ. 

The kingdom of God! It was the dream 
of John the Baptist. Jesus began his min- 
istry, preaching ^^The kingdom of God is at 
hand." More than any other one phrase this 
phrase permeates his teaching. Solve the 
secret of the meaning of this, and you have in- 
terpreted the message of the Master. The first 
Christians dared to defy the Empire of the 
Caesars because they believed that they were 
citizens of the kingdom of God. Was it in 
their mind a kingdom to be found in the other 
life, beyond the grave, or a kingdom to be set 
up on earth? Words have been multiplied by 
the thousand in the discussion of this question; 
but the answer must be, both. Jesus said, ^The 
kingdom of heaven is within you, or among 



54 The Abundant Life 

you"; but Jesus also said, ^^many shall come 
from the east and the west and sit down with 
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of 
heaven." The martyrs rushed gladly upon 
death because to them death was the entrance 
into the kingdom of heaven; and I do not be- 
lieve that they were disappointed. 

The kingdom of God is wherever the will of 
God rules : in the soul of the believer, and in any 
group of sincere believers here on earth; in a 
glorious realization, when freed from the bonds 
of mortality, among the redeemed spirits of the 
other world, where are the many mansions; 
and is to come to a complete fulfillment in an- 
swer to the agelong prayer, ^^Thy kingdom 
come," in the world of freedom, brotherhood, 
democracy toward which the human family on 
earth is slowly but surely pushing its way. So 
if the dream of God's kingdom comes to you 
with the thought of death, or in the hour of 
the death agony, cherish it, believe it, for it 
shall not fail you; if it come in the stress of 
your every day work, in your hope for a better 
relation between worker and employer, of a 
community free from the saloon ; of a city hon- 
estly governed for the best interests of its citi- 



The Life of Vision 55 

zens; of a state, a nation, a world, in which 
^^reason and the will of God" prevail; cherish 
that vision ; realize it, bit by bit, little by little, 
never despairing; for it surely is God's will, 
and will prevail. And, best of all for the in- 
dividual soul, remember the old saying: ^^My 
mind to me a kingdom is," and make that king- 
dom, of your own spiritual experience, the 
kingdom of God. 

The dreams and visions of the prophets 
which visualized their conception of the ideal 
divine-human life for man were concretely re- 
alized in the person of Jesus Christ. After 
that presence was taken from men by the cru- 
cifixion, the vision of the Christ came to take 
its place. First, closely related to the old bod- 
ily life in those visions of the resurrection days, 
at the tomb to the women, in the upper cham- 
ber to the eleven, on the Emmaus road to the 
two, by the lake shore to the fishermen, on the 
Galilee mountain to the five hundred. Then 
it came more completely freed from the limi- 
tations of the flesh, to Stephen at the hour of 
his death, to Saul on the Damascus road, to 
John on Patmos. Since then, through all the 
ages the vision has come to the souls of the lov- 



56 The Abundant Life 

ers of the Christ, the ancient saints, the medie- 
val mystics. Has it ceased to come to men, in 
these days of cold scientific dogmatism? No, 
it still comes, in the meditations of the spirit, 
in the sacred hours of grief, in the moments of 
exalted purpose, of high endeavor, of conse- 
cration. Cometh it to you, my brother, my 
sister? Drive it not away by cold sceptical in- 
quiry. Take yourself at your best and high- 
est. Let the Christ into your heart, into your 
life. Cherish the vision, and make it real in 
your life. 



^'Run ye to and fro through the streets of 

Jerusalem, and see now, and know, and seek in 

the broad places thereof, if ye can find a man, 

if there be any that doeth justly, that seeketh 

truth." 

— Jeremiah V-i. 

''Quit you like men, be strong." 

— First Corinthians XVI-13. 

''Behold the man." 

— JohnXIX-5. 



THE MANLY LIFE 

There were doubtless plenty of male feather- 
less bipeds walking about the streets and loaf- 
ing in the open places of Jerusalem that day. 
I suppose it would have been impossible for 
Jeremiah to walk a block without running 
against a man in the common sense of the word. 
Plainly what he wanted was something differ- 
ent from this. Most languages have two words 
for the idea which in English is covered by the 
one word "man." Latin had, besides "homo" 
which stood for man in general with no sug- 
gestion as to character, "vir," the root of our 
"virile" and "virtue," which implied the qual- 
ity expressed by our adjective "manly." Greek 
had a similar distinction between "anthropos" 
and "aner": the former showing its meaning 
in the technical word "anthropology," which 
would include the man nearest to the ape as 
well as the man but little lower than the angels, 
the latter showing its force most vividly in the 
appeal of Paul to the Corinthians "Quit ye like 



6o The Abundant Life 

men/' which in the original is one word, 
^^andrizesthe," ^^Be men." There is a corre- 
sponding usage in Hebrew; and the word here 
is the one which has the same connotation as 
Latin ^Vir" and Greek ^^aner" and English 
^^manly." 

What Jeremiah sent out his search party for 
was a man in the high ethical sense of the 
word, some one who really deserved to be 
called by that high name. He went first 
among the poor, and then among the great and 
rich, but found no man in either class. What 
God looks for in humanity is just this quality 
of ^^manliness," just that which our nature as 
human beings demands that we should be. No 
more than this, no less than this. It will be 
well worth while, then, to inquire what is cov- 
ered by this term, what are the signs by which 
God will recognize a man as a man, what are 
therefore the qualities we should seek to culti- 
vate in ourselves that we may recognize in our 
own souls that which God demands of us as 
men. 

It might very well have turned out that the 
man Jeremiah was searching for was a woman. 
The sex idea, which is strong in the words re- 



The Manly Life 5 1 

ferred to above, is not implied in the analysis 
of manliness which follows in the story we are 
considering. The difference between men and 
women is real and important, but it is not the 
difference here emphasized. It is not the dif- 
ference between manliness and womanliness 
which makes men's clubs reek with tobacco 
smoke and rattle with pool balls, while wo- 
men's clubs are fragrant with ^^Mary Gar- 
den," and quiet with the noiseless movements 
of the ^^Bridge" cards. It is the lack of true 
manliness and true womanliness in both cases. 
That women outnumber men in the churches 
is not so bad for the churches as it is for the 
men. It is due to the same causes which make 
women's clubs organizations to promote men- 
tal culture and civic improvement, while 
men's clubs, to so large a degree, are organiza- 
tions to encourage idleness and promote men- 
tal and spiritual degeneracy. A man is not a 
man in the sense of Jeremiah's search warrant 
because he happened to be born a male; nei- 
ther can a woman claim exemption from this 
selective draft because she happened to be 
born a female. 

The essentials of manliness, according to the 



62 The Abundant Life 

search-warrant which Jeremiah carried, are 
two: ^4f there be any that doeth justly and that 
seeketh truth." Doubtless true manliness is a 
very complex quality, and a full analysis would 
yield many more particulars; but a study of 
these two with some of their obvious implica- 
tions will be sufficient for the present occasion. 

A man is one who doeth justly. Justice has 
a twofold operation, but there is a strong ten- 
dency to limit our thought of it to one, and 
that the less important of the two. We think 
of justice more frequently as that which con- 
demns evil. More important is that operation 
by which justice approves what is good. In 
both directions a man may be said to be just or 
unjust: as he condemns or fails to condemn, 
and as he approves or fails to approve. 

Furthermore justice has a three-fold direc- 
tion; and here also men are apt to give undue 
emphasis to that which is of the least impor- 
tance, if indeed there can be any less or more 
in this connection. We are all constantly 
called upon to think about justice toward our 
fellow men. A large part of our social ma- 
chinery is designed to secure that, and we all 
pay our taxes to build court houses and employ 



The Manly Life 63 

judges, clerks, jurymen, sheriffs, and consta- 
bles; and then many of us pay out private fees 
to lawyers in order to secure external, legal 
justice between man and man. But as to the 
more important matters of justice toward our- 
selves and toward God, how is it? The fact 
is, that the nearer we come to ourselves and to 
God, the more difficult it is to secure justice. 
In a rough, imperfect way, to be sure, and yet 
with some approach toward satisfaction, our 
courts secure justice between neighbors; but 
what court shall compel a man to be really just 
to his wife and to his children? Most people 
are kind in these intimate relations, for natural 
affection and the easy good nature of the nor- 
mal man sees to that; and perhaps some might 
say that in these relations kindness rather than 
justice should rule. It is easier to be kind than 
to be just, and kindness has its true function 
only when it rests upon a solid foundation of 
justice. Too many loving husbands keep their 
wives in a state of pecuniary dependence, 
which is absolutely unfair, and which in spite 
of all conceivable tenderness, is likely to lead 
to disaster. Fathers are generally kind to their 
children. Even when an occasional flash of 



64 The Abundant Life 

temper hurts the child with words that sting 
or blows that bruise, the tenderness and indul- 
gence which are easy to the average man will 
soon heal the hurt, for children are naturally 
forgiving, and soon forget. How many par- 
ents reflect seriously, however, that children 
have rights that ought to be considered? How 
many reflect that the mere fact of bringing a 
child into the world places the parent under 
definite obligation to give that child its due. 
^^Love is the fulfilling of the law" ; and a mere- 
ly legal justice is a wretched substitute for 
love ; but real love begins with justice and from 
that secure fortress goes out on its adventures 
of kindness. To be just to those nearest and 
dearest is harder than to be kind; but it is es- 
sential, in order to make the kindness worth 
while. 

When we come to deal with ourselves the 
difficulty is increased. It is a difficult act of 
the mind to consider oneself at all. If self- 
consciousness is the real distinction between 
man and the brute, as some say, it is one of the 
highest and also one of the most difficult acts 
of the soul. To detach oneself from oneself, 
so to speak, and as it were, to set that self off 



The Manly Life 65 

and gaze upon it and see its faults and its vir- 
tues, and judge its deserts — how difficult that 
is ; and that is why it is so hard for man to be 
just, to be fair to himself. It is hard both 
ways : hard to see one's faults fairly, hard to see 
one's virtues, one's capabilities, one's obliga- 
tions fairly. It is so easy for men to ^^com- 
pound for sins they are inclined to by damning 
those they have no mind to." It is just as easy 
to approve the qualities that come easy to us, 
and to overlook if not condemn those which 
go against our grain. 

The trouble with the soul that does not ac- 
cept the Christ life as its own life is injustice 
to itself in both ways. It does not face its own 
defect. It will not acknowledge its own need 
of that forgiving grace of God which is the 
special gift of Christ. The man who will not 
receive the Christ ideal as his in effect says 
that he does not need what Christ offers. He 
is not sick; so does not need the good physi- 
cian; he is not guilty, so does not need par- 
don. No human being can honestly take this 
attitude and be fair to himself. It is the baby 
plea, ^^I did not mean to," or ^^I aint any worse 
than the others." Any human being who is 



A 



66 The Abundant Life 

fair to himself will recognize and confess his 
need of healing and forgiveness. Until he is 
thus fair to himself Christ's ^^Come unto me" 
will have no appeal to him. 

The soul that does not accept the Christ 
ideal is unjust to itself in another way. It 
treats itself as unfit for the higher experiences. 
It condemns itself to the lower levels of ma- 
terialism. It says in effect, perhaps in a spirit 
of humility, but even so unjustly: "I am not 
worthy that Thou shouldst come under my 
roof." The depreciation of oneself which 
keeps many a man on the level of sensual plea- 
sure, material achievement, worldly gain, is 
injustice to the soul which might be dwelling 
in the atmosphere of spiritual joys and laying 
up treasure in heaven. The rich fool of the 
parable was a fool when he said to his soul 
'^Thou hast much goods laid up in store, eat, 
drink and be merry," not only because he 
should in the course of nature soon have to 
leave those stored up goods, but more because 
he was unjust to his soul in supposing it could 
feed upon such goods, when in truth it must 
have a higher food or perish. ^^So is every- 
one," said Jesus, ^ Vho is not rich toward God." 



The Manly Life 67 

A man owes it to himself to feed his higher 
nature with the spiritual food it must have un- 
less it shall perish; if he denies his soul this 
higher nourishment he is in the deepest sense 
unjust to himself. 

And he is thus unjust to himself because he 
is unjust toward God. Our relation to God re- 
alizes itself externally in our relation to self 
and to fellow man. We find God in our souls 
and in the souls of men. This, however, re- 
mains somewhat confused, entangled with our 
selfish hopes, ambitions, pleasures, or our per- 
sonal likes, dislikes, and prejudices. It be- 
comes personalized in a manner that can be 
disentangled from these limiting and confus- 
ing associations only in Christ. As we find 
our relations to Jesus to be, so we may infer 
are our relations to God. If we treat Christ 
fairly we may believe that we are treating God 
fairly; and this is the final and determining 
condition of a thoroughly manly character. It 
is fair to fellow man, it is fair to self ; but above 
all, and as a necessary condition to the others, 
it is fair to God in Christ. One never gets a 
real notion of one's own appearance until he 
comes before a mirror and sees himself there 



68 The Abundant Life 

reflected. So we shall never realize our in- 
justice to ourselves; our weak allowance of 
our imperfections and our sins, our cruel re- 
fusal of the higher and better gifts we might 
receive, until we bring ourselves face to face 
with Christ, the mirror of a perfect humanity 
because the revelation of God in man. 

I suppose every generous soul sometimes 
feels a warm glow of indignation as he thinks 
of the treatment Christ received on earth. 
Men scorn and hate Judas who betrayed him. 
Men wonder at Peter who denied him. Men 
are very bitter against Herod and Pilate be- 
cause of the travesty of justice at their courts, 
and hate the Sanhedrin for their evident deter- 
mination to hound him to death, under the 
forms of a judicial trial. Yet, I believe, all 
the scenes of that dreadful experience are in 
a very real sense repeated in the treatment 
men mete out to Jesus today. Still the self- 
seeking nominal disciple cries ^^Hail Master," 
and with the kiss of pretended love betrays him 
to his enemies. Still the loving but weak fol- 
lower trembles before the silly ridicule of the 
world, and denies him. Still the powers that 
be, ordained of God to do justice, turn their 



The Manly Life 69 

strength against Christ's poor, and favor the 
world of greed and power. Still, in the per- 
son of his humble followers, the Christ is 
scourged, scorned, spat upon, crucified. Still, 
in his own person, in his own divine, gracious 
tenderness and love, he exposes himself to 
man's injustice and is condemned. 

It is a question which faces every man, which 
every manly man should face and answer if 
he would preserve his manliness: what have 
you done, what shall you do with Jesus? The 
man who is not a Christian, in the accepted 
meaning of the term, one who is not an avowed 
follower of Jesus Christ, framing his life plan 
according to that of Jesus, owes it to his man- 
hood as he owes it to God to face and answer 
the question : why? In my judgment there can 
be but one answer ; and that is : he has not dealt 
fairly, justly, with the Christ. Some excuse, 
no real reason worthy of a man, has prevented 
his giving Christ the love and service that are 
his due. 

Conscience asks, ^Vhat thinkest thou of 
Christ?" Often the answer is, ^^I think Deacon 
Jones or church-member Smith is a very mean 
sort of man, and I think I do not wish to join 



70 The Abundant Life 

the church he belongs to." Christ says: ^^I 
came not to call the righteous, but sinners to 
repentance." — ^^Repent, for the Kingdom of 
Heaven is at hand"; and the heart answered 
^Well! I try to do about right, and I do not 
know that I have anything special to repent of 
more than others." Christ says : ^^Behold I stand 
at the door and knock"; and the heart says: 
^ Well, Master, stand awhile longer or go away 
and come back when I am in a mood to attend 
to you; I really am too busy playing in the 
dirt, now." Christ says: ^^Come unto me all ye 
that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give 
you rest." Men say: ^Vhat beautiful words, 
worthy of illumination and of repetition in all 
the perfection of poetry; but as for me I do 
not understand some doctrines which some 
Christians have considered important, and I 
can not come until I do." The last message of 
the risen Christ from heaven to earth is: 
^Whosoever will, let him take the water of 
life freely"; and men have answered: ^^I can 
not take it, till I am changed, and I must wait 
till the Spirit of God changes me." These are 
not imagined answers, but the actual phrases 
and words heard during a few years of pastoral 



The Manly Life 71 

experience. They are simply not fair. They 
are one and all avoidance of the issue. They 
do not, in manly fashion meet and squarely set- 
tle the issue between the soul and Christ. They 
are all like Pilate, washing his hands, and yet 
delivering the blameless prisoner into the 
hands of the cruel mob. 

We wonder, as we read the story of the cru- 
cifixion of Jesus, that there were none brave 
enough to stand for him. We ask ourselves: 
were there no men there to be true to their 
friend, and by one brave word or deed to turn 
the tide and save him from the cross, or at 
least die with him? Were they not ashamed 
to live on, and he upon the cross? It is really 
a stranger thing that now, in the light that 
nineteen centuries of Christianity have poured 
upon the character of Jesus, men still hold 
aloof. It is because they are not fair to them- 
selves or to him, because they do not justly. 

In a deeper analysis, it is because they do 
not seek the truth. Implied in the idea of jus- 
tice is the love of truth. The two can hardly 
be distinguished. Doing justice is the outward 
manifestation of the spirit that is supremely 
truth-seeking. The most illuminating word 



72 The Abundant Life 

Jesus ever used about himself was that word to 
Pilate: ^^To this end have I been born and to 
this end am I come into the world, that I 
should bear witness unto the truth. Every one 
that is of the truth heareth my voice" ; and Pi- 
late at once classified himself among those who 
do not hear his voice, when he answered with 
the sceptic's sneer, ^What is truth?", and 
straightway went out to the crowd to act the 
lie, which was his nature, and deliver the inno- 
cent to the fate of the guilty. To seek the 
truth, and to do the justice which is the exter- 
nal manifestation of that truth is to be a man; 
and when the soul is brought face to face with 
the revelation of truth in Jesus Christ, to be a 
truth seeker and a justice doer, that is to be a 
man, is to be a Christian. 

At different times, in my life, I have heard 
lawyers address juries. The one address of 
that kind which made a lasting impression on 
my mind and will never be forgotten ran some- 
thing like this: ^^Be men! Forget your pre- 
judices! Forget whether you are Democrats 
or Republicans; whether you are prohibition- 
ists or high license advocates; forget your sec- 
tarian differences ; remember only that you are 



The Manly Life 73 

men ! Think like men ; decide like men ; and 
I am not afraid to leave the verdict with you." 
I think the Lord Christ says to you: ^^Be men. 
Forget prejudice, selfish aims and hopes, am- 
bitions, pleasures; just be men, and you can 
not fail to be Christian." 

When Pilate brought Jesus out to the crowd, 
perhaps with the futile weak desire that some 
change in the mood of the crowd might save 
him from the consequences of his unmanly, 
cowardly injustice, he said ^^Behold the man!" 
Probably he meant little by this spectacular 
performance ; but unconsciously he uttered one 
of the great words of history. Jesus is the man 
of men, and every true man belongs with him. 
Henceforth, since Jesus has thus been brought 
before the consciences of mankind, to be a man 
in the full meaning of the word is to be a 
Christian. 



"O worship the Lord in the beauty of holi- 

— Psalm XCVI-9. 



ness." 



THE BEAUTIFUL LIFE 

A phrase that occurs more than once in the 
Psalms is ^The Beauty of Holiness." It binds 
together two conceptions or ideals of living 
which belong together, but have been too 
often separated and even made to antagonize 
each other. Beauty has always been sought 
and loved by man; always there have been 
elect spirits who have striven to realize the 
ideal of holiness ; but too often beauty has been 
unholy and holiness has been unbeautiful. 

The Greeks dreamed of beauty as no other 
people have dreamed of it; they uttered their 
dream in the perfection of their art. They 
did not in the same degree dream of holiness; 
and we do not look in Greek life for examples 
of saintliness. Severity, order, purity of intel- 
lectual ideal, and certainty in the relation of 
ideas one to another characterize Greek art 
and Greek life. They hated crudity, deform- 
ity, the unbeautiful ; but we do not find with 
them the compelling impulse to a spiritual 



76 The Abundant Life 

ideal. We are not won by the Greek to bring 
our lives into relation to the absolute purity 
of the divine. 

On the other hand, the early Christian 
sought for holiness with little thought for 
beauty. Rather, it seems that to him in a large 
degree the beautiful was incompatible with 
holiness. The conception of the Christ that 
we find in the earliest Christian art repels us 
by its harsh ugliness. This ugliness of the 
Christ, developed from the words of the pro- 
phet: ^^his face was marred more than any 
man," ^^there was no beauty that we should 
desire him," was reflected in the ugliness of 
much of the early Christian living. To the 
cultured pagan Christianity seemed an unlove- 
ly thing. It had revolted from the cloying 
sweetness of the pagan ideal, and it chose 
rather the bitterness of a life of self-renuncia- 
tion ; not the hypocritical ^^entsagen" of Goe- 
the, which was a sentimental cloak for self in- 
dulgence, but real renunciation of pleasure 
and beauty, gladly made for the sake of win- 
ning the crown of righteousness. Paul's 
words, ^^I buffet my body and bring it into 
bondage," with other passages of similar im- 



The Beautiful Life 77 

port, were interpreted to teach an asceticism 
which, in many cases cut off all the brightness, 
all the sweetness, all the beauty of life. The 
ideal of that period and type of Christian 
living is seen in St. Simeon Stylites, the 
wretched, filthy, bony, naked form, standing 
or kneeling for year after year upon his lofty 
pillar, hoping by this utter sacrifice of all that 
brightens life, to win the prize of sainthood. 
But the beauty of the pagan world made 
conquest of the asceticism of Christianity. As 
the Christian church climbed to the throne of 
the Caesars, it lost much of its spirit of self- 
denial, and took in exchange something of the 
spirit of pagan beauty. With power and 
wealth came the possibility of costly art. The 
church built majestic basilicas, and great ca- 
thedrals which rivalled the Grecian temples in 
perfection and far surpassed them in variety 
of beauty. It clothed its priests in brilliant 
robes. It developed a majestic ritual, and 
made the arches of its temples echo with lovely 
music. With this development of beauty, 
through the later ancient period and the whole 
medieval church life, went hand in hand moral 
and spiritual corruption; and the culmination 



78 The Abundant Life 

of the movement which made beauty the ser- 
vant of religion is coincident with the lowest 
depths of moral degradation that the Christian 
church ever reached. When Rafael and Mi- 
chael Angelo were serving the church, the 
Medici and the Borgia were its rulers, and the 
sale of indulgences was rousing Martin Luther 
to his great protest. 

So with the coming of a purer day of Chris- 
tian living, with a new ideal of holiness in the 
puritan and the mystic of the earlier Protes- 
tantism, beauty almost disappears from the 
Christian consciousness. The preaching of 
the burly monk Luther is attended by the queer 
often unlovely art of the German school. Lucas 
Cranach and Albert Diirer are true, realistic, 
and the latter profoundly thoughtful and sug- 
gestive, but without a trace of sensuous beauty. 
The fierce puritan who broke into fragments 
the statues of English cathedrals and covered 
fair frescoes with whitewash was rudely re- 
peating the early Christian protest against 
what was felt to be an unholy beauty. The bare 
walls and glaring windows and discordant an- 
thems of our early New England churches 
came from the negative protesting phase of a 



The Beautiful Life 79 

strenuous endeavor for purity, for righteous- 
ness, for holiness, by those who felt that the 
ideal could be reached only by turning wholly 
away from the corrupt and corrupting beauty 
of the past. • 

We are now in the early stages of a new 
movement of the religious life toward the 
beautiful. In our church architecture, in our 
church services, notably in our music, we are 
seeking, in these days, to express our devotion 
and our desire for righteousness in forms that 
shall charm our senses. Are we then tending 
toward a neo-paganism in our church life? 
Are we in danger of yielding to the fascination 
of sensuous beauty, in form, in color, in lan- 
guage, in sound, and losing the zest of our 
search for holiness? Or can we guard the 
movement, so that we shall regain the beauty 
of the Greek ideal, and of the ancient and 
medieval ritual and religious art, and yet not 
lose the strenuous endeavor for the highest 
spiritual achievement which was the glory of 
the Christian in the age of persecution and as- 
ceticism, and of the puritan and the mystic in 
the age of reformation? 

Such a conserving of the highest Christian 



8o The Abundant Life 

ideal, while we reach toward a fitting expres- 
sion of that ideal in beautiful form, and learn 
to utter it in beautiful words wedded to beau- 
tiful music, should be possible. For the ideal 
of the Bible is not beauty without holiness or 
holiness without beauty; but the beauty of 
holiness. Nor did Jesus depart from this ideal 
when he came to give us the fulfillment of the 
law. He consciously, deliberately, and for 
our sakes, turned away from the ideal of ascet- 
icism as exemplified in the life and the teach- 
ing of John the Baptist, toward fulness of 
living. He graced the wedding feast with his 
presence. He mingled in the social pleasures 
of his time. He used his miraculous powers 
to open the blind eyes, to straighten the crook- 
ed and the withered limbs, to take away the 
horror of leprosy and restore the beauty of 
health. That passage in Isaiah which he de- 
clared to be fulfilled in his mission, has besides 
the promises of blessing which he cited, this: 
^^to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of 
joy for mourning, the garment of praise for 
the spirit of heaviness." He bade us consider 
the lilies and love the beauty of their raiment, 
with which, he said, God had clothed them. 
True, he bore the bitter contradiction and 



The Beautiful Life 8i 

persecution of men, and died in the agony of 
the cross; but the glory of the resurrection 
followed the shame of the crucifixion. The 
brightness and the beauty of Easter are as es- 
sential an element of true Christian experi- 
ence as the sadness of Good Friday. 

Jesus knew how in his own life to realize 
the ideal of the psalmist. In that wonderful 
life and in the words which fell from his lips, 
we see what the old Hebrew singer meant by 
the ^^Beauty of Holiness." True, he said that 
if any man would come after him, he must 
deny himself and take up his cross daily and 
follow him; but just as true is it that in the 
last words of his last interview with his disci- 
ples before his agony he said: ^Tn the world 
ye shall have tribulation ; but be of good cheer ; 
I have overcome the world." 

The last message of his earthly life comes 
not from the shadow of the cross, but from the 
sweetness of that dewy morning by the lake- 
side, when he taught Peter the lesson of love ; 
and from the glory of that day on the mountain 
when he bade the disciples go out in the assur- 
ance of his continued presence with them, and 
make disciples of all the world. 

No. In spite of the historic conflict between 



82 The Abundant Life 

beauty and holiness, there should be no such 
conflict in the present. We may safely seek 
for beauty in our worship if we keep the wor- 
ship pure. We may rejoice in the beauty of 
lovely words and lovely sounds, if we do not 
lose the spiritual content of the words and the 
spiritual uplift of the sounds. God made the 
world good, and God made us to live in this 
good world. Then beauty should be the ser- 
vant of holiness, and holiness should clothe 
itself in the garment of beauty. If we remem- 
ber the words of Jesus and deny ourselves daily 
in his service, we need not fear to rejoice in 
the beauty with which the world is full. The 
beauty of the stars, the flowers, the sunset sky, 
is simply the right working of the laws of 
nature. We delight in this manifestation of 
the rightness of natural law and natural pro- 
cesses, and we call it beautiful. Holiness is 
simply the right working of the law of God in 
the spiritual life of man. Then the beauty of 
the flower, the sky, the star, is the holiness of 
nature; and the holiness of a consecrated life 
is the beauty of the soul. 



"Behold, that which I have seen to be good 
and to be comely is for one to eat and to drink 
and to enjoy good in all his labor, wherein he 
laboreth under the sun, all the days of his life, 
which God hath given him: for this is his por- 



tion." 



ECCLESIASTES V-l8. 



THE COMMONPLACE LIFE 

One of the most baffling books in the Bible, 
not to say in all literature, is Ecclesiastes. So 
difficult has it seemed to the average reader of 
Christian faith that he has limited himself to 
the poem on old age and the exhortation to 
^^remember thy Creator in the days of thy 
youth" and let the rest go, as, to make the best 
of it, incomprehensible. A recent student of 
the book, however. Professor Genung of Am- 
herst, has pointed out that it has a positive and, 
for our time, a most wholesome teaching in its 
substance and main course of thought, as well 
as in its poetical conclusion. To examine and 
develop the truth contained in this suggestion 
will make plain to a thoughtful reader that 
Ecclesiastes contains a strong, if sometimes 
bitter medicine for some of the worst illnesses 
of life, and lays a firm foundation for a most 
wholesome philosophy of conduct. 

The negative portion of the book, (and it 
is this which strikes coldest upon the enthu- 



86 The Abundant Life 

siasms of our age and seems in strongest con- 
trast to the usual positiveness of the Bible 
teaching) points out the unsatisfactory nature 
of those ambitions which have engaged the 
hopes, plans, and endeavors of men who have 
been most conspicuous in the world. The les- 
sons are old enough and so constantly repeated 
by all moralists that they have largely lost 
their effectiveness though nobody attempts to 
deny them. Luxurious living never gave real 
satisfaction ; we all know this, and yet we al- 
most all try to secure all the luxury within our 
reach. Great learning never gave satisfaction 
to its possessor: all men know this, yet some of 
the finest natures in every generation give 
themselves to its attainment with an unquench- 
able fire of zeal. We can easily apply the les- 
son to all those aims : power, fame, wealth, and 
the rest, whose attainment in greater or less 
degree marks a few as distinguished from 
their fellows. Universal experience says 
Amen to the Preacher's word : ^ Vanit}^ of vani- 
ties, all is vanity." So far as real satisfaction 
is concerned all these possessions which distin- 
guish men from one another are at last 'Vanity 
and a striving after wind." One hardly needs 



The Commonplace Life 87 

to be reminded of the wearying circles of time 
and chance ; of the certainty of death and the 
uncertainty when it may end our earthly toils, 
of the hopeless destiny which shuts off so many 
lives from such attainments. At the best, at 
the most successful, these things by which men 
seek for distinction give no satisfaction to the 
soul. Luxury, fame, power, wealth, by uni- 
versal testimony of those who have gained 
them, are vanity. If this were all of the book 
it would be unanswerable and would well de- 
serve to be set aside from our serious consider- 
ation as hopelessly pessimistic. 

This is not all of the book, however. Six 
times, at turning points in his discussion, the 
Preacher repeats in substance his main thesis ; 
that the real satisfaction of life is found in two 
things: bread and work. ^^Behold that which 
I have seen to be good and to be comely is for 
one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy good in 
all his labor, wherein he laboureth under the 
sun, all the days of his life which God hath 
given him: for this is his portion." This is as 
full a statement of the thesis as any, but one 
needs to consider them all to get the full 
thought of the writer. In the days of Roman 



88 The Abundant Life 

decadence, the cheap politician thought to sat- 
isfy the people with ^^bread and circuses." Note 
the difference between this ideal and the 
^^bread and work" of the Preacher. This is 
not the pseudo-Epicurean motto which Paul 
quoted only to repudiate: ^'Let us eat and 
drink for tomorrow we die" ; for that left out 
the idea of work, and what is more important 
yet left out the idea of God. To the Preacher, 
life is God given, and the power to enjoy one's 
daily bread and one's labour arises from the 
consciousness that they too are God given. 
These two considerations lift the message of 
the Preacher out of the mire of materialism 
and the cloud of pessimism. Never of these 
does he say ^Vanity of vanities." ^^Go thy 
way," he says, ^^eat thy bread with joy" ; but 
he does not fail to add: ^^for God hath already 
accepted thy works." 

Now this matter of eating and drinking is a 
very commonplace affair, and perhaps may 
therefore seem hardly worthy of such serious 
treatment. But consider! It is an affair of 
interest to all those common people of whom 
the wise Lincoln said that God must love them 
because he has made so many of them. In no 



The Commonplace Life 89 

other one function could the final object of all 
political and social action be so well summed 
up as in that of food. It is an often quoted and 
seldom disputed saying, whether or not it 
originated with Napoleon, that every army 

marches upon its stomach. Owen Meredith's 
famous lines put the matter strongly, yet are 
not far from the truth: 

^We may live without poetry, music 

and art; 
We may live without conscience and 

live without heart; 
We may live without friends ; we may 

live without books; 
But civilized man cannot live without 

cooks." 

One of the lessons of the world war which 
will not soon be forgotten is the primal neces- 
sity of food. If a nation can be fed it will make 
shift to defend itself, to clothe itself, to live; 
but if the food supply fail everything fails with 
it. Society rests upon agriculture. The farmer 
is the ultimate man. These are commonplaces, 
undisputed, everywhere accepted. What is 
not everywhere accepted, however, is that the 



90 The Abundant Life 

higher satisfactions of life are found right here 
in this commonplace matter of our food. The 
industry, the enterprise, the invention of all 
the world, find their chief result in the spread- 
ing of the breakfast and the supper tables of 
the world. The central idea of that word so 
rich in sacred associations, which more than 
all other words carries in itself the most pre- 
cious values of life, the word home : the central 
idea of this word is expressed when the family 
gather about the table where their daily meal 
is served. Whether it be the palace of the 
King, the house of the ordinary man, the hut 
or the tenement of the poor, the tent or the out- 
door fire of the gypsy: where the daily bread 
is served, there is the home. When your 
friend would show you that he loves you he 
asks you to eat with him in his home. When 
a highly honored guest is to be most highly 
honored you provide a feast of some kind, you 
ask him to break bread with those whose com- 
panionship would most honor him. The ideal 
of a rightly constituted society is realized when 
there is daily bread for every one. The luxury 
of the very rich is ^Vanity and striving after 
wing"; but the simple abundance of whole- 



The Commonplace Life 91 

some food for the whole people is the ultimate 
goal of all social reform. When every honest 
man can be sure that there is food enough for 
him and those dependent on him, every day 
of their life, then the nation may be at peace; 
for all the blessings of peace and prosperity 
come w^ith this. 

Not to be separated from this matter of our 
daily bread is the question of labor. The two 
go together. It has already been suggested 
that the ultimate purpose of industry and en- 
terprise and invention is the provision of man's 
necessary food. This is unmistakable when 
we consider the activity of the individual. In 
any large view of human life it must be recog- 
nized that what men labor for is their daily 
bread. That is what wages mean. Labor dif- 
ficulties, strikes, and the constant struggle be- 
tween capital and labor all come back ulti- 
mately to this. If the wage is plainly sufficient 
to provide the necessary living there is peace, 
industrial peace. If the margin is too narrow; 
if the laborer can hardly if at all provide for 
his dependents, there is trouble and there 
ought to be trouble. Man's instinct is to 
work. The normal, healthy man will work, 



92 The Abundant Life 

whether or not there is an absolute neces- 
sity in his individual case for the wage in 
order to provide his food. But such cases 
of independence, as we call it, which are 
rather cases of dependence upon ancestors who 
have left a surplus of labor to their children, 
are happily rare. Most work in this world 
has a very definite relation to food, and can 
hardly be separated from it in our thought. 
The beautiful picture of nature in the 104th 
Psalm shows us how ^^the young lions roar 
after their prey, and seek their meat from 
God"; but '^Man goeth forth unto his work, 
and to his labor until the evening." 

The fatal fault in our modern industrial civ- 
ilization is that it does not provide work for 
every industrious man. The recurring periods 
of unemployment are the symptom of a deadly 
social disease. When our economists have 
found the cause and cure for this they will 
have accomplished their mission; when soci- 
ety has removed that cause and accomplished 
that cure, the Kingdom of God will be indeed 
at hand. When that has been achieved, it will 
not be long, even if it has not already come as 
the necessary accompaniment of the other, till 



The Commonplace Life 93 

the nature and the conditions of men's work 
will have been so modified that every man may 
really rejoice in his work; not simply in the 
fact that he has work, nor in the wages that 
the work brings, but in the work itself. This 
is the ideal of the Preacher, that man may 
^^enjoy good in his labor." When that has 
been made possible; when there shall be a job 
for every man who is willing to work, a long 
step will be taken toward that reconstruction 
of society which every serious minded and well 
informed person feels to be imperative. 

A long step, but not the whole way; for it 
must be possible for the average man to ^^enjoy 
good in his labor." Shorter hours, that the 
work may not utterly exhaust, but the spirit 
remain fresh and ready for the task; condi- 
tions of safety, wholesome air and light, such 
surroundings as will keep the working hours 
free from deadening weariness, and soul and 
body destroying disease; such redistribution of 
tasks and modification of the practice of divi- 
sion of labor, so that there will always be left 
enough of interest in the work itself for the 
enjoyment, the zest in his task which should 
be possible for every worker. 



94 The Abundant Life 

These general conditions may seem better 
adapted to the class room than to the pulpit, 
and of course they are to be worked out in de- 
tail by the economist, the legislator, the leaders 
in organized labor and the captains of indus- 
try. There is, however, implied in them a les- 
son for the individual in the commonplace life 
of his every day which a little thought will 
make plain. The common man and the un- 
common alike are to find satisfaction in the 
common pleasures and the common occupa- 
tions of life. Not the luxuries of the table, 
but the plain bread and meat of the average 
man give the real satisfaction of life. Not 
the midnight orgies of the wretched rich, with 
their sure retribution of disease and death, 
physical and spiritual, but the home table, the 
picnic lunch, the simple meal of the group of 
friends who eat to live, rather than live to eat, 
are what tend to lasting satisfactions. Drunk- 
enness and gluttony, or to use more polite 
phrases, the bracers and appetite stimulants 
of society, these are what the Preacher calls 
^Vanity and striving after wind." The whole- 
some food, taken with good appetite, seasoned 
with pleasant social intercourse, accompanied 



The Commonplace Life 95 

perhaps with fragrant flowers and happy song, 
these are among the most substantial satisfac- 
tions that life can give. They are consecrated 
by the example and constant practice of our 
Savior. It is really extraordinary, how large 
a place in his short life is taken by the simple 
pleasures of the table. On the lake shore with 
his disciples; twice bidding the great multi- 
tude share the simple luncheon with him; at 
Matthew's home, with Simon the Pharisee, in 
the upper room with his chosen followers, in 
the loved home of his friends, Mary and Mar- 
tha and Lazarus. You can trace the progress 
of his wonderful life by these occasions when 
he joined with others in the commonplace 
pleasures of the table. Make then, your daily 
bread sacred. Keep the sweet old custom of 
inviting your God and your Savior to join you 
in your breakfast, your dinner and your sup- 
per. Guard your life from excess in these 
commonplace matters of every day, and make 
them always sweet with love and savory with 
happy fellowship, and you will have traveled 
far on the way to the ideaj life. 

And even so with your daily task, your com- 
monplace work. Envy not the man who is 



96 The Abundant Life 

called to do what are called the great tasks, to 
render the sort of service which makes men 
conspicuous, famous in the world. One and 
all they will tell you that the reward of such 
distinction is like dust and ashes in the mouth. 
Burke pauses in one of his great political ad- 
dresses to say — ^What shadows we are and 
what shadows we pursue !" The most popular 
President of recent times said ^^I like my job." 
But I think he would have told you if he had 
spoken out his heart, that the fame, the pay, the 
publicity, were one and all ^Vanity and a striv- 
ing after wind." So you may find satisfaction in 
your job. Learn to like it. Make it such that 
you can like it. The larger part of your wak- 
ing hours must be spent with your job. If 
your life is a happy life, there must its happi- 
ness be largely found. Companionship, mer- 
riment, music, art; all these and many other 
such things may come in to give needed variety 
and freshness. But as soon as they usurp the 
place of the real work of life, the curse falls. 
They pall upon the spirit, ^^Vanity of vanities" 
is the word. But the day's task need never so 
pall. This you may do with the solid satisfac- 
tion of knowing that it is your work, which no 



The Commonplace Life 97 

other in earth or heaven can do as well as you. 
You may hitch your wagon, or in modern 
phrase your Ford to a star. The chariot of old 
days or the limousine of today has no such 
harness in its equipment. This is no recent 
idea. It is old as Eden. When God said, ^^In 
the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," he 
pronounced no curse upon man, as we have 
mistakenly assumed. The story tells us he 
cursed the earth for man's sake; which may 
mean that briers and thorns and difficulties 
that make it hard to wring a living from the 
soil were better for man than the comparative 
ease of the simple life of Eden. At any rate, 
whether this is a fair interpretation of that part 
of the Eden story or not, it is true always that 
work is man's best blessing, that no curse is so 
deadly as the curse of idleness, and that the 
right way toward satisfaction in life is the way 
that seeks to provide the opportunity for work 
to every man and to make the nature and the 
conditions of every man's work such that he 
can honestly say that he enjoys the good in his 
labor which is God's gift. The secret lies in 
that last phrase. When we can without pre- 
tense, in honest conviction feel that our work 



98 The Abundant Life 

is God given we can take solid and enduring 
satisfaction in it. George Herbert, the dear 
old ^^metaphysical" poet of the seventeenth 
century, put the thought into quaint and per- 
fect poetry when he wrote : 

^^A servant, with this clause, 
Makes drudgery divine; 
Who sweeps a room as for thy laws 
Makes that and the action fine." 

And the little English maid-servant who 
thought she had been converted in the great 
Mr. Spurgeon's church put exactly the same 
idea into her own natural language: ^Why do 
you think you are converted?" asked the 
preacher: "I sweeps in the corners and under 
the bed now," answered the girl. Paul exhorts 
the Thessalonians when inclined to be busy- 
bodies and idlers, ^^that with quietness they 
work and eat their own bread," and so sums up 
in few and commonplace words a perfect ideal 
of life social and individual. 

It is not strange then, but quite what should 
be expected, that some of the most sacred and 
searching spiritual teachings of the Master 
use the analogy of work and bread. In no 
word of his is there a higher claim for the es- 



The Commonplace Life 99 

sential unity of his being with that of God than 
when he said: ^^My Father worketh hitherto, 
and I work"; and nowhere does he state the 
relation of the believing soul to him in deeper 
phrase than when he said: ^^I am the bread of 
life," or when, to the Samaritan woman, by 
the well, he declared: ^Whosoever drinketh of 
the water that I shall give him shall never 
thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall 
become in him a well of water springing up un- 
to eternal life." It is by a very true instinct that 
the Christian church has seized upon that sa- 
cred moment of the last supper when he gave 
the broken bread and the cup to his chosen 
friends as symbols of his body and blood 
consecrated to the world's salvation, and has 
made the commonplace supper the central 
mystery of the faith ; though of equal signifi- 
cance is that other symbolic action of the same 
occasion when he washed his disciples' feet, 
and so declared the function of those who 
would do as he did to be the commonplace 
form of common work. There are two clear 
voices which speak in the midst of the con- 
fused and confusing sounds of the mystic book 
of Revelation : one when the veil of the unseen 
world is lifted and we are told of the blessed 



lOO The Abundant Life 

dead who die in the Lord, that ^^their works 
do follow them" and that ^^they serve Him day 
and night in his temple" ; the other when the 
Master says that if the soul of man shall heed 
his knocking and open the door: '^I will come 
in and sup with him and he with me." Of all the 
incidents of that strange time between the res- 
urrection and his final separation from the 
earth, none is more sacred and suggestive than 
that of the interview in the early morning on 
the lake shore. Last of earthly deeds recorded 
of the Master was that homely, commonplace 
deed, gathering the dry sticks together, kin- 
dling the fire on the beach, preparing the fish 
and setting them to broil, that the hungry, 
weary fishermen might not have to wait for 
their breakfast when they should come in from 
their night of toil. With our daily bread thus 
consecrated by the Redeemer's presence and 
loving care, we may with good hope and full 
assurance carry into our daily work the con- 
sciousness of that same sacred presence and 
care, and in all the commonplace details of 
every day, live and work in the light divine. 
'Whatsoever ye do, whether ye eat or drink, 
do all to the glory of God." 



^^Thou foolish one, this night is thy soul re- 
quired of thee, and the things which thou hast 
prepared, whose shall they be? So is he that 
layeth up treasures for himself, and is not rich 

toward God." 

— Luke XII-20-21. 

^^Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, 

where neither moth nor rust doth consume, 

and where thieves do not break through nor 

steal; for where thy treasure is there will thy 

heart be also." 

— Matthew VI-20-21. 

^^Unto me who am less than the least of all 
saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the 
Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ." 

— Ephesians III-8. 



THE LIFE OF GREAT POSSESSIONS 

In Browning's ^^Instans Tyrannus," the ty- 
rant tells how all the force of his unlimited 
power was brought to bear upon one poor and 
hated wretch, who was struck to earth, beaten 
into helplessness, the energy of spite exhausted 
on him — and then: 

^^I looked, from my labour content. 

To enjoy the event ; 

When sudden — how think ye, the end? 

Did I say ^^without friend?" 

Say rather, from marge to blue marge, 

The whole sky grew his targe, 

With the sun's self for visible boss. 

While an arm ran across 

Which the earth heaved beneath, like a 
breast 

Where the wretch was safe pressed. 

Do you see? Just my vengeance com- 
plete. 

The man sprang to his feet, 



104 ^^^ Abundant Life 

Stood erect, caught at God's skirts and 

prayed. 
— So I was afraid." 

Nature and nature's God at the service of the 
man who prays. All things his. This, in sub- 
stance, is what Paul says about you who pray, 
in that exultant cry at the end of the third 
chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians. 
It should be written as free verse, for it is of 
the essence of the highest, purest poetry: 

For all things are yours. 

Whether Paul or ApoUos or Cephas, 

Or the world, or life, or death, 

Or things present or things to come, 

All are yours : 

And ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's. 

My thesis, then, is this wonderful assertion : 
that to the soul of the man who prays ; in other 
words who lives the ^^Godly" life, to whom 
God is a real and active presence and power; 
who daily, hourly ^^practices the presence of 
God"; to such a being all history, all forces of 
the present, all tendencies and revelations of 
the future, all are tributary; they are all his; 
for he is Christ's, and Christ is God's. Mar- 



The Life of Great Possessions 105 

velous truth, if it be indeed a truth ; man the 
object of God's loving care, Paul, ApoUos, and 
Cephas fellow workers with God for him; this 
mighty universe rolling on its pathless way, 
and releasing its majestic powers, for him; the 
great complex of forces we call the world, the 
unsolved mystery we call life, the dread sum- 
moner Death, every event and circumstance of 
the present, and every new experience of the 
untried future, all these ^^working together for 
good" to the man who loves God. Was there 
ever an optimism like this? If this can be 
made real to our apprehension, all the wealth 
of all the multimillionares sinks into absolute 
insignificance in comparison. 

^Taul, Apollos, and Cephas." The names 
are typical of what the past means, what it has 
done for us. Paul the prophet, the mystic, the 
revealer of unknown or unconsidered phases 
of the eternal truth, who made Christianity a 
world faith instead of a Jewish sect; Apollos 
the eloquent expounder of the Scriptures, the 
scholar, the historian; Cephas, Peter, the or- 
ganizer, the constitution maker, the conserva- 
tive, the ruler. The three stand for all that 
the past gives us. The explorer, the progres- 



io6 The Abundant Life 

sive thinker, the inventor, all that phase of the 
contribution of the past to the present may be 
included under Paul. The labor of all the 
scholars and investigators who have opened 
the sealed books of nature and of life, who 
have accumulated the material of fact and 
known event on which the Pauls have based 
their excursions into the unknown and their 
revelations of the true, all these may be count- 
ed under ApoUos. The empire organizers 
and conquerors, the nation builders, the crea- 
tors of law, of codes and constitutions and 
creeds, all these may be thought of as followers 
of Cephas. These all include what man has 
done for man, what history has left for life, 
what humanity has to show for its centuries of 
weary journeying, of toil and travail, of blood 
and iron, of suffering and death. All this is 
yours. You are not to be enslaved by the past; 
but to make the past your slave. You are not 
blindly to follow the prophet or the seer, not 
even Paul. He is yours; you are not his. If 
his vision speaks to your soul make it your 
vision. All this wondrous past is for you to 
make your own and use for your good. 

How? Well, first by knowing it. That is 



The Life of Great Possessions 107 

one phase of education, or what Arnold called 
^^culture." To know the best that has been 
thought and done in the world. Very foolish 
is the idea that this is all of education; but 
more foolish yet is the idea that this can be 
ignored. You can not know it all, you say? 
In one sense this is true. No one can master 
all the details of what has been done. In an- 
other and far more important sense you can 
know it. You can be intelligent about it. The 
great contribution of the Hebrew, the Greek, 
and the Roman to the world's stock of ideas 
may be familiar to you. The great names of 
the leaders, the teachers, the law givers, the 
martyrs, may be in your minds and hearts. No 
soul need be in ignorance. 

But whether known or not, the work, the 
suffering, the achievement of the past has been 
for you. You unconsciously walk the roads 
they have builded. You inevitably breathe 
the atmosphere their thoughts and prayers 
have invigorated; you inherit the wealth they 
gathered and left. You are ^^heir of all the 
ages, in the foremost files of time." The point 
is that these gifts of the past are for you to use^ 
not to use you. Your ancestors have given you 



io8 The Abundant Life 

certain traits, moral; intellectual, physical. If 
they are good traits, that is creditable to the 
ancestors, but it is simply an asset, an oppor- 
tunity, for you. On the foundation of this in- 
herited personality, you are to build a charac- 
ter, and work out a life. It is yours, to use. If 
these traits are bad, that is to the discredit of 
the ancestors, but it need not make you the 
slave of their evil habits or disposition. These 
too are yours. You do not belong to them. 
They are to be corrected, developed in right 
directions, the good possibilities hidden under 
them to be discovered, dragged out to the light, 
made active forces in your character building. 
You will not be held responsible for them, but 
will be held to strict reckoning as to what you 
did with them. So with all that the past has 
contributed to your life. Your nation, your 
church, your creed, the revelation of the 
Christ that has come to you. You belong to 
none of these. These all are to be your posses- 
sions, and the test question of your life is to be 
what you have done with these great posses- 
sions. What sort of an American are you? 
What are you doing with your Americanism? 
What sort of a Christian are you? What are 



The Life of Great Possessions 109 

you doing with your inherited Christianity? 
What use are you making of your creed, the 
creed to which you were born? Are you mak- 
ing your spirit a slave to that creed? Reciting 
its words when your soul denies its spirit? You 
could not make a worse use of it than that. On 
the other hand are you spitting on the creed 
for which your ancestors gave their lives, by 
which your Godly father shaped his good life, 
and on which your loving mother founded her 
tender ministration? Then you do a base and 
foolish thing. Use the faith of your fathers. 
Make it yours. Reverently change it so that 
it may serve your life. It is yours. 

So, as to the vast complexity of events, forces, 
personalities which we call the present; you 
are not to be its slave, it is to be your posses- 
sion. It is just as unworthy of a man to be the 
blind slave of the spirit of the time, as to be 
a hide-bound adherent of the past. The new 
creed is not necessarily any better than the old. 
The old, at least, has the sanction of experience. 
The new can not yet be tested by the one sure 
test of its fruits. ^Trove all things, hold fast 
that which is good," may apply to the present 
as well as to the past. The wealth of the pres- 



no The Abundant Life 

ent is in a true sense yours, though its legal 
title may be in very different names. It is in 
Hawthorne's ''Our Old Home" that he tells 
of seeing a little boy in one of the great ducal 
residences of England; and when told that he 
was the owner of the place, wondering in what 
sense it could be said that he who evidently 
could not in the least appreciate that great his- 
toric property really owned it. Did it not in 
a more true sense belong to the intelligent 
stranger who knew its history, who could ap- 
preciate and enjoy the books in its library, the 
pictures in its gallery? The legal owners of 
such great possessions have been known to sell 
the books and pictures in order to pay gam- 
bling debts. Did such persons ever really own 
them? No, things present like things past are 
really the possessions of those who can appre- 
ciate, who can use, who can control them. 

The life of the present, individual, social, 
national, world-wide, is yours, in the sense that 
you are responsible for its right on-going. No 
one of us can disclaim responsibility for the 
world war. Collectively, if not individually, 
we have done our part in bringing it on. In- 
dividually, without any qualification, we have 



The Life of Great Possessions iii 

our part to do in bringing it to the ending 
which we believe is in accordance with the 
will of God. It is yours, in the double sense 
of responsibility and opportunity. We thought 
at first that it was Germany's and France's 
war. Then we learned that it was England's 
war, and that brought it nearer to us. Then 
we learned that America had something to do 
with it; but many of us inclined to say in our 
hearts: it concerns the people of the Atlantic 
Coast, but not us in the Central States. Then, 
a little later, we learned that it was America's 
war, just as really as England's or France's. 
Then many of us kept holding it away from 
ourselves, saying in our hearts, it is the Presi- 
dent's war, we hope he will win it; or it be- 
longs to Congress to see that the necessary leg- 
islation is passed, to win this war; or it is a 
matter of the navy and the army, of anybody 
and everybody but just ourselves. As, one 
after another, our associates and companions 
were swept into its resistless current, and went 
to the training camps, or to various forms of 
home land service, or across the sea to ^^some- 
where in France," gradually we came to see 
that it is our war. We can not escape the re- 



112 The Abundant Life 

sponsibility ; we can not be blind to the oppor- 
tunity. This greatest event of history, this 
tremendous storm of human endeavor and 
struggle, intimately concerns us all. It is ours. 
It touches us in our businese life, in our social 
life, in our home life. It will be won or lost, 
not only according as the strategists plan its 
campaigns, or the soldiers fight its battles, or 
the navies guard the seas ; but according as you 
and I eat our daily meals, invest our little sav- 
ings, do our little daily tasks, speak our words 
of criticism or of encouragement, contribute 
our share of depression or of cheer, of selfish- 
ness or of devotion, to the atmosphere which 
the souls of men and women around us must 
breathe. I read somewhere that after the 
battle of the Marne, some one asked Kitchener 
how he accounted for the outcome of that mi- 
raculous event, and he answered in substance, 
^^Some one must have been praying." If there 
is nothing else that we can do, we can pray. 
It is our war, and it is for us, by all that we can 
give and do, and at last and always by prayer, 
to win the war. 

For it is true that not only the past and the 
present are ours, but the future also. "Things 



The Life of Great Possessions 113 

present, and things to come." This is true of 
our individual life. Jesus was announcing a 
universal principle when he said, ^^Ask and ye 
shall receive. Seek and ye shall find. Knock 
and it shall be opened unto you." Disappoint- 
ments and surprises come to make us doubt; 
but in spite of all such exceptions it remains 
the rule that what we on the whole desire and 
work for is the measure of our attainment. In 
the oldest of English poems, overshadowed as 
it is by the old pagan notion of a resistless 
^Weird" or destiny, the writer pauses in the 
story to say ^^sometimes with the help of God, 
the brave man may overcome Weird." As 
man frees himself from the bands of igno- 
rance and more and more learns the secret of a 
real trust in God, the ^^sometimes" passes into 
always, and he learns at last to say with Paul : 
^We know that, to them that love God, all 
things work together for good." Our future is 
our own, to make or mar as we will. Whatever 
may be the surprises, the losses, the troubles, 
the disappointments, the difficulties we meet, 
they are all ours. We are not the slaves or the 
helpless victims of any or all of them. They 
are the material of life. Out of them we are 



114 ^^^ Abundant Life 

to fashion such a life as we will. Even of our 
mistakes a wise teacher has said: "He is not 
greatest who makes the fewest mistakes, but he 
who best overcomes his mistakes. Organize 
victory out of mistakes." What you shall be, 
whether brave and pure and true, or timid, 
stained and false, is after all far more impor- 
tant than what may happen to you. You may 
not be able to control the happenings, but you 
have absolute control of that more vital matter, 
what you shall do with those happenings, how 
you shall meet them and deal with them. 
What you shall be in the future years and 
through all eternity rests absolutely with you. 
Things to come are yours. 

All very fine in theory, I think I hear some 
one objecting, but how shall any one make 
these fine phrases stand for realities in our in- 
dividual lives? As men are seen in the actual 
experiences of the world they appear to be the 
victims of their heredity or their environment. 
They often seem to be shut in to a certain 
course and quality of life as if within iron bars. 
They seem so, yes; but that was not a great 
philosopher or thinker, who in the seventeenth 
century wrote the unforgettable words : "Stone 
walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a 



The Life of Great Possessions 115 

cage." Thinking to write a pretty love song, 
he left one of the great messages of Literature : 

^^If I have freedom in my love 
And in my soul am free, 
Angels alone that soar above 
Enjoy such liberty." 

What we are determines what we really 
have. The greatest conceivable material 
wealth leaves the ignorant boor still a 
wretched pauper as to spiritual riches. No 
imaginable degree of material poverty can 
make the true child of God other than rich 
toward God. If we were asked to name the 
two souls who had the greatest real wealth of 
all men in history I think we might well name 
Socrates and Jesus. We know nothing and 
care nothing about the land or the money that 
may have been in the name of Socrates; and 
we know that Jesus had not where to lay his 
head, and that all the wealth his murderers 
could divide was his seamless robe. We know 
too that the wealth of all the Rockefellers, 
Carnegies, and Rothschilds of the world could 
not buy the riches of Christ's possessions. 

**A11 things are yours — for ye are Christ's 
and Christ is God's." The practical realiza- 



Il6 The Abundant Life 

tion of all that has been said is found here. 
Would we make it actual of our lives that we 
are possessors of the infinite wealth of the past, 
the present and the future, of Paul, ApoUos, 
and Cephas, of life and of death? The way is 
simple if not easy. Make it true that you are 
Christ's as Christ is God's. The way to pos- 
session is surrender. The man who would 
possess money surrenders his life to money. 
The man who would possess any art or any 
field of learning or any type of great achieve- 
ment surrenders himself to that form of activ- 
ity. The soul that would have the great pos- 
sessions, that would be in very truth "heir of 
all the ages," "heir of God," must be "joint 
heir with Christ"; must surrender his life to 
the Christ life so that the Christ life may be 
his. Then all this wull be true of him. He will 
have received the gift which Christ says he 
came to give. Possessed of the unspeakable 
gift, his commonplace life will be beautiful, 
manly, bright with heavenly visions, calm with 
the assurance that it is the reasonable life, and 
abundant with all the fullness of God. 

THE END. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Oct. 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Dnve 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-21 IK 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




017 043 656 8 




